POVERTY, HUNGER AND OTHER EVILS OF COMMUNISM

Stephen ChapmanCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Countless numbers of homeless people living on the streets . . . a health care system that serves only some of the people . . . widespread hunger and malnutrition . . . enormous gaps between rich and poor. America in the Reagan- Bush years? No-the Soviet Union and its allies in the Gorbachev era and before.

Americans had always assumed that though people in the East bloc had no freedom, no democracy and no Cabbage Patch dolls, they at least could count on economic security. They might not be rich, but-unlike here-no one was starving to death in the gutters. The Soviet ambassador to the U.S. dramatized the point a couple of years ago by giving a $5,000 donation to homeless activist Mitch Snyder.

That gesture, like the entire communist enterprise, was a hollow fraud. The Soviet people and their fellows in Eastern Europe, it`s become clear, were even worse off than the fiercest anticommunists imagined. Communism may be vanishing, but before it goes, the full scope of its debacle ought to be known.

For years, the evidence has been trickling in that even by the standards of success established by the Left, East bloc socialism has been a disaster. In 1984, Harvard scholar Nicholas Eberstadt exposed the health crisis afflicting the Russian people. Life expectancy, he pointed out, was six years lower than in Western Europe. Infant mortality was three times higher. Death rates were rising for every age group.

''Measured by the health of its people,'' he wrote, ''the Soviet Union is no longer a developed nation.'' And things were getting worse, not better.

Deteriorating health isn`t the whole story. Thanks to the advent of glasnost, the Soviet press is now publicizing a whole range of ills that were supposed to be unique to capitalism.

Cathy Young, a writer who grew up in Moscow, reports in the New Republic magazine that ''some independent Soviet journalists put the number of transient and homeless people at 700,000; Moscow News claims there are 3 million.'' Many of those who have housing, she notes, are living in the equivalent of homeless shelters, without even such essential commodities as running water. Those with real apartments, which are typically small, spartan and overcrowded, are the lucky ones.

Poverty, far from being eradicated, is rampant. As many as 17 percent of Soviets live below the official poverty line, which probably understates the situation. Poverty in the Soviet Union, says Young, is worse than in the U.S., because it ''is much more likely to result in malnutrition.''

An economist writing in one prominent Soviet newspaper said that income distribution is even more unequal in the Soviet Union than in the U.S. By Western standards, he argued, 86 percent of the Soviet population is poor. The health care system, health officials concede, serves no more than 60 percent of the people. Soviet miners have to go on strike just to get soap.

Despite some advantages-higher educational levels, a briefer experience with communist rule and proximity to the West-Eastern Europe doesn`t have it much better. East Germans aren`t heading to the West just out of

disenchantment with their rulers. They`re also fleeing for their lives.

Eberstadt, in a recent study for the congressional Joint Economic Committee, says that the countries of Eastern Europe have replicated a Soviet achievement: actually reducing life spans during peacetime-which for an industrialized society is unprecedented and, it was once thought, virtually impossible.

Since 1965, the average life expectancy at age 1 in Western Europe has risen from 71.8 years to 74.7 years. In Eastern Europe, it`s fallen from 71.4 years to 70.9 years. Every country in the region has suffered the same setback. Infant mortality has declined, but it`s still at least two-thirds higher than on our side of the Iron Curtain.

Why are communist societies so sickly? One reason is the self-destructive health habits of their people, which may be a symptom of frustration and despair. Why quit smoking? So you can live a few more years under communism?

Another is that these governments have cut spending on medical care and wasted much of what they have spent.

People under communism used to make a joke: Capitalism means the exploitation of man by man, while socialism means just the reverse. They, and we, didn`t know the half of it. The dismantling of these regimes, avowedly dedicated to the interests of the poor, will be a victory for the poor as well as everyone else.